Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday he was right to compare a prominent Mexican Jew to Adolf Hitler because of his political mentality, ignoring protests from the country’s Jewish community.
López Obrador said Wednesday that advertising executive and political analyst Carlos Alazrachi, a critic of the president, was “Hitler,” urging Mexico’s Jewish community to issue a statement dismissing the claims as “unacceptable.”
Lopez Obrador made the reference to Alazrachi after a video clip of him discussing with opposition politicians who said Mexico was allowing illegal immigrants from Venezuela to enter a new airport was shown during a regular government news conference. The government denies this.
“He is very conservative, just like Hitler,” López Obrador said on Wednesday.
In a statement, the Mexican Jewish community rejected the use of the term “Hitler” to refer to any individual: “Any comparison with the bloodiest regime in history is deplorable and unacceptable.”
Hitler’s Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II.
Some Mexican opposition politicians were offended. Opposition congressman Santiago Creel said on Twitter: “The president’s comment against Carlos Alazraci not only violates freedom of expression, it is disrespectful and disproportionate. Calling a prominent member of the Jewish community ‘Hitler’ is very disgusting and abnormal.” .
On Thursday, López Obrador returned to the topic at his usual press conference, saying that “Azaraki is a follower of Hitler’s ideology,” referring to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and his use of lies to manipulate public opinion.
“This is the essence of Al Azraqi’s propaganda or propaganda strategy,” said the president, who often invoked Goebbels when he sought to discredit his critics.
To make his point, López Obrador showed a short video in 2021 in which Alazari said the key to defeating the president’s ruling Movement for National Renewal (MORENA) was to use lies and propaganda against it.
Al Azraki told Reuters that he could not understand the president’s comments. He said that his remarks in the passage were taken out of context and that he made it clear that in order to compete with MORENA, one had to use propaganda, as the party did.
Al Azraqi also posted a video on Twitter on Thursday condemning López Obrador’s remarks and asserting opposition to his policies. He concluded by saying that he forgives the insults to the president “because you don’t know what you’re doing.”
López Obrador noted that he had a long-standing disagreement with Alazraki, but expressed respect for the Jewish community.
“I have very good friends in the Jewish community,” he said.
(Reporting by Valentina Heller and Dave Graham in Mexico City; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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